He was adored by the fashion world, but a new biography of designer Alexander McQueen reveals the dark side of his brilliance.

Yesterday, we told of his cruelty to the woman who made him a star. Today, we reveal his macabre plan to commit suicide in public...

When Alexander McQueen decided he had to change the way he looked, he turned first to Janet Street-Porter. Could she give him the number of her personal trainer?

She did so — but after a few sessions, her trainer refused to continue. As Janet recalls, McQueen was ‘always coked out of his head or coming down from being coked out of his head, and doing loads of other drugs, too.

‘So my trainer said he couldn’t work with him in case he had an accident or a heart attack while they were working out.’

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Designer Alexander McQueen told a friend he had his death all planned out, and had visions of taking his own life on the catwalk. He later committed suicide at his Mayfair home. Pictured: On the Paris catwalk in 2005

By now approaching 30, McQueen had become increasingly uncomfortable with what he saw in the mirror: he was overweight and — in the words of one lover — could easily be mistaken for a scrap-metal dealer rather than a fashion designer.

As creative director of a prestigious fashion house, he was convinced he needed to look sleeker — more like Ralph Lauren or Calvin Klein, say — to stand a chance of becoming a marketable global brand. And thus his long, expensive quest began.

An approach to Jerry Hall’s dentist proved successful: his teeth were finally fixed, and his smile transformed. Indeed, it looked so like Jerry Hall’s that one of his boyfriends started calling him Jerry.

Next, he paid for £3,000-worth of liposuction, which sucked out 8lb of fat from his stomach and thighs. McQueen was delighted, not least because he imagined that he could now eat whatever he wanted with impunity. A few months later, he’d put all the weight back on again.

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Desperate, he paid thousands of pounds for gastric band surgery to limit the amount of food he could eat. The results were dramatic and he lost 2st in three months.

On the surface, it seemed, McQueen’s life had never been better. In 2000 — in the midst of all these physical transformations — he was poached by Givenchy’s bitter rival, Gucci, and rewarded with a contract worth more than $30 million and the promise of more than 50 McQueen stores round the world.

For a once-scruffy East London boy who’d specialised in shocking the Establishment, this was heady stuff indeed. Posing happily for photographs, he told everyone that his new look was all down to healthy eating, yoga and exercise.

For a long time, nothing seemed to affect his upward trajectory — not even fashion commentator Brenda Polan’s thunderous denunciation of him in the Daily Mail as ‘the designer who hates women’.

Friends described how McQueen was suffering inner torment when he took his own life in 2010

Yet she was by no means alone in condemning shows that seemed to portray women as victims of violence and sexual assault.

Joan Smith, in the Independent on Sunday, accused the designer of degrading women. His show, titled Eshu, had featured a model with a silver mouthpiece that had spikes nearly reaching her eyes. ‘What on earth was going through the mind of the man who designed it?’ she asked.

McQueen could have answered his critics, but to have done so would have left him open to questions about the source of the dark imagery that ran through his work — the abuse he and his sister had suffered at the hands of her first husband.

However, an increasing number of commentators began to see McQueen’s designs as art. Even the Victoria & Albert museum included some of his creations.

Meanwhile, the designer himself was seen flirting with former defence secretary Michael Portillo at the launch party.

The deal with Gucci had turned the designer into a ‘celebrity’ who now sat in roped-off VIP areas and earned serious money.

His then boyfriend, George Forsyth, remembered flying with him to New York on the spur of the moment just to buy a couple of Warhol prints for £125,000.

Another whim was the purchase of a £30,000 chandelier, from the Four Seasons hotel in Paris, from which McQueen plucked its hundreds of Swarovksi crystals in order to decorate his Christmas tree.

One night, as they watched a nature documentary together, he asked Forsyth if he’d like to go to Africa. Two days later, they were on a plane — the sole occupants of the entire upper deck, which McQueen had booked just for them. After 48 hours, he’d had enough of the arid landscape and chartered a plane to visit Naomi Campbell on the coast.

‘We spent three days partying and taking drugs there — though Naomi didn’t do any coke,’ recalled Forsyth — who was later to die of an accidental drug overdose.

Back in London, McQueen was losing control. There were, according to Forsyth, parties every night: champagne receptions; cocaine passed around on silver salvers; three-day-long drink and drug binges.

‘I don’t think he really liked going to parties unless he was on lots of drugs,’ said author and socialite Plum Sykes, who had met him when she worked for Vogue.

‘If he was taking lots of drugs, he would be more mean and vicious, but when he was healthy and going to the gym he would be delightful.’

His close friend known as BillyBoy recalls that McQueen’s drug consumption was actually reaching frightening proportions.

‘I was concerned because he was so completely out of it,’ he said. ‘It brought out a whole other person inside of him, like a demon trying to escape unleashed.’

The fashion designer was left distraught by the death of his mother Joyce, who died a few days prior to him

Once, McQueen turned up to a magazine launch, high on cocaine and with a male prostitute on his arm. At work, he was often angry — reportedly screaming at his staff and throwing things at them. At home, when he was suffering from an occasional attack of paranoia, he would sit in the dark for hours with a camcorder, hoping to capture ghosts or spirits on film.

As time went on, he became more and more obsessed with death and the afterlife. Even before the suicide of his mentor, Isabella Blow, in 2007, which affected him deeply, he was regularly visiting mediums.

McQueen’s brother, Michael, a 48-year-old taxi driver who nearly died of a massive heart attack in 2008, recalls the designer plaguing him with questions soon afterwards. ‘Did you see anything? Did you see the gates?’ he asked eagerly. Michael told him to ‘p*** off.’

McQueen’s near-pathological preoccupation with the macabre became more pronounced than ever in his fashion shows.

In one show alone, staged in 2007, there were images of locusts, owls, heads rotting into skulls, flames, blood and naked girls.

It was all too much for the magazine that had once hailed him as a ‘creative god’: American Vogue promptly cancelled a planned feature about him.

Yet McQueen, once so eager for global success, no longer seemed to care. Instead, he was ever more fascinated by death — researching the passing of Marilyn Monroe, for instance, and reading all her post-mortem reports.

At the same time, he found himself facing another personal crisis. Suddenly finding himself without a regular boyfriend — even one of his on-off ones — he started paying up to £200 for sex at the start of 2009.

‘Drugs were involved, porn was involved, and probably another escort — he was very much into groups,’ said Paul Stag, a male escort and porn star who never touched drugs himself.

McQueen (pictured with Prince Charles) was said to have once worked on the lining of a jacket for the Prince

McQueen had a host of famous friends including Elton John (left) and supermodel Naomi Campbell (right)

After three weeks, Stag and McQueen decided to become a couple. Henceforth, no money would change hands, though it was understood that Stag could continue his freelance escort work.

According to friends, it was around then that McQueen started to experiment with crystal meth, a highly addictive and dangerous drug. To anyone close to him, it should have been obvious that he was desperately unhappy and looking for any possible means of escape.

Stag believed that his new boyfriend was primarily suffering from an overload of work.

‘Lee was working these idiotic hours, getting up early, working all day and working deep into the evenings,’ he said.

McQueen’s brother, Tony, was also worried. Lee, he said, would often sleep on a bed in the office. ‘They talk about all this money he had — but he never went home. As soon as he’d got one collection out, he’d have to start another.’

In fact, McQueen had had enough of the fashion treadmill and began to wonder what else he could do.

Could he set up a design school? Set up as a photographer? Perhaps open his own gay porn studio?

But all these ideas came to nothing. To his friend and former colleague Sebastian Pons, he confided that, in retrospect, he should never have signed with Gucci. ‘But I can’t get out of it now,’ he said. ‘I have built my own prison.’

In spring 2009, he invited Pons for a holiday at a £1.7 million house he’d bought in Majorca, and the two men sat talking one night.

‘No. My last. I have it in my head. In my last collection, I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to end this.’

His plan, he said, was to do it during a show, in front of the audience. ‘He told me he’d have a Perspex or glass box, and in the middle of that another glass box,’ recalled Pons. ‘Towards the end of the show, he’d come out from under the ground and shoot himself, so all his brains would drip down the glass.’

Pons was so alarmed by his friend’s deteriorating mental health that he telephoned the McQueen office in London.

The member of staff he spoke to was dismissive: McQueen was fine — there was nothing to be concerned about.

‘No, he is not fine, darling,’ Pons replied. ‘He is really messed up.’

The designer (pictured with Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Annabel Neilson in 2004) died in February 2010

In May 2009, feeling lonely and desperate, McQueen took an overdose. It was a cry for help. When he recovered, he asked his legal team to finalise the details of his will, leaving most of his money to a charity called Sarabande, set up to help young designers.

Having signed the will that July, he took another drug overdose — and again survived.

Soon, there was more terrible news: his beloved mother, Joyce, had kidney failure. When she was dying, the family gathered around her bedside — but her youngest son stayed away, unable to cope with the prospect of losing her.

Predictably, he was devastated when he heard that she’d died on February 2, 2010. A few days later, he called his brother Tony and asked what Joyce had said before she passed away.

‘She said she loves you — and you’re not to go and kill yourself now,’ he was told.

A few days later, McQueen saw his sister, Jacqui. ‘He was lost,’ she recalls. ‘As he was leaving, he stood at the doorway and gestured for me. I thought: “That’s not like Lee because normally he says ‘bye’ and then he’s gone.” But he melted in my arms. He was like a child then.’

Unable to face the thought of working, McQueen, now 40, locked himself away in his flat. Telling no one, he came to a decision. There would be no more cries for help; this time he’d really do it.

With small, subtle gestures, he started to say his goodbyes.

On February 8, he spoke to his nephew, Gary, and asked him to create a gravestone for his mother with an angel in its design. Then he phoned his sister, Janet, and told her that he loved her.

He gave the model Annabelle Neilson his wallet, explaining that he needed a new one, and a photograph of himself with one of his dogs. And he wrote to a male friend in New York, thanking him for always being a good friend.

The exact chronology of his actions in the evening of February 10 and the early hours of the next day is unclear, but we know that, determined to leave nothing to chance, he took a sleeping pill, a tranquilliser and a significant amount of cocaine, and tried to slit his wrists.

Then after one failed attempt, he hanged himself in the spare-room closet.

It was the day before his mother’s funeral.

McQueen died a wealthy man, leaving £1 million in art works, more than £6 million in property and £11,614,625 worth of shares.

He also left a rich legacy that continues to influence everything from couture to designs for the High Street.

Tragically, however, it was the inner torment that helped propel him to the top of the fashion world that also cut short his extraordinary life.